Wikipedia

Perusall

Perusall is a social web annotation tool used by students at schools and universities across the world.[1] It allows users to annotate the margins of a text in a virtual group setting that is similar to social media—with upvoting, emojis, chat functionality, and notification. It also includes automatic AI grading.[2]

History edit

Perusall began as a research project at Harvard University.[3] Then it became an educational product for students and teachers, a "collaborative annotation tool that helps students" and "promotes class engagement and discussion."[4]

Teacher and Student Perspectives edit

According to Lemanski and Vennamen "Perusall is a useful resource for both university faculty and students to improve feelings of connectedness, reading of assigned textbooks and course materials, and satisfaction with the course textbook. [It] may increase overall student satisfaction with online coursework."[5] Eisenreich and Disney found "that Perusall could be a quick fix to increase our students’ engagement."[6]

Another student survey compared student preferences between Hypothes.is and Perusall. 41% of students preferred Perusall, 35% preferred Hypothesis, and 24% stated "no clear preference."[7] The same study found that more student users wrote more annotations with Perusall than they did with hypothes.is, and more students also had a higher mean character volume per annotated paper for Perusall, than for hypothes.is.[8]

Research by Jian-Wei Lin studied the impact of using social annotation: "The results showed that adopting collaborative annotations on formative assessments significantly enhanced the learning achievements of students and extended retention time..."[9]

Other researchers have found that Perusall can contribute to deeper engagement for women and "minoritized" students: "An open annotation tool like Perusall can foster more equitable interactions for historically minoritized students. Women reported that open annotations deepened knowledge and engagement with the source and their peers. Women of color, in particular, acknowledged the benefits of social annotations as a tool that redistributes epistemic authority."[10]

Functionality edit

Notably, Perusall was the first annotation program to "include AI-powered functions, like automated grading," which can sync with a course gradebook. Also, "Perusall, much like Hypothes.is, integrates with major LMSs, such as Canvas and Blackboard. This integration ... can help reduce instructor and student onboarding, make documents more easily accessible, and aid the coordination" of social annotation activities.[2] Another study compared Perusall's “Machine Learning algorithm, which assesses the quality of annotations” with assessments done by teachers and found “scores quite similar to those of the teacher" and also that "students positively perceived the automated scoring.”[11] Students can annotate text, images, equations, or even videos.[12] Indeed, Perusall includes a catalog with "a large and growing number of books … The platform can also handle a wide range of other material types, including PDFs, EPUB book files, Word documents, Excel documents, source-code files, and snapshots of webpages."[13]

Instructors can change the settings for automatic AI grading. Perusall can grade annotations based on many different criteria, including time spent reading, how well-distributed student annotations are, the number of annotations made, and the quality of each annotation.

Social Interaction edit

According to Eric Mazur at Harvard University, Perusall moves "information transfer and sense-making" from books to online, making "it interactive, promoting social interactions between students." In addition, he argues that "the platform promotes intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to improve student performance."[14]

Size edit

According to Perusall, they are currently "serving 2,000,000 students at 3,000 educational institutions in 90 countries."[1]

References edit

  1. ^ a b "About Perusall". Perusall. Retrieved 16 January 2023.
  2. ^ a b Hodgson, Justin. "Social Annotation as Writing: Promising Technologies and Practices in Writing Studies". Retrieved 16 January 2023.
  3. ^ King, Gary. "An Introduction to Perusall" (PDF). Harvard University. Retrieved 16 January 2023.
  4. ^ ""What is Perusall?"". Montclair State University Instructional Design and Tech. Montclair State University. Retrieved 13 January 2023.
  5. ^ Lemanski, Melanie; Venneman, Sandy (2023). "Student Satisfaction with the Perusall Social Annotation Platform". Journal of Educators Online. 20 (1). doi:10.9743/JEO.2023.20.1.18. S2CID 256299293.
  6. ^ Eisenreich, Heidi; Disney, Andria (2022). "A Quick Fix for Increasing Student Engagement: Perusall". College Teaching. 72: 39–41. doi:10.1080/87567555.2022.2076649. S2CID 248802407.
  7. ^ Porter, Gavin (2022). "Collaborative Online Annotation: Pedagogy, Assessment and Platform Comparisons". Frontiers in Education. 7: 1–20. doi:10.3389/feduc.2022.852849. S2CID 248573805.
  8. ^ Porter, Gavin (2022). "Collaborative Online Annotation: Pedagogy, Assessment and Platform Comparisons". Frontiers in Education. 7: 1–20. doi:10.3389/feduc.2022.852849.
  9. ^ Lin, Jian-Wei (2013). "Harnessing collaborative annotations on online formative assessments". Educational Technology & Society. 16 (1): 263–274.
  10. ^ Bakermans, Marja; Pfeifer, Geoff (2022). "Who writes and who responds? Gender and race-based differences in open annotations". Journal for Multicultural Education. 16 (5): 508–521. doi:10.1108/JME-12-2021-0232. S2CID 252824649.
  11. ^ Cecchinato, Graziano (2020). "Perusall: University learning-teaching innovation employing social annotation and machine learning". Qwerty: Open and Interdisciplinary Journal of Technology, Culture and Education. 15 (2): 45–67. doi:10.30557/QW000030. S2CID 234417429. Retrieved 21 January 2023.
  12. ^ King, Gary. "An Introduction to Perusall" (PDF). Harvard University. Retrieved 16 January 2023.
  13. ^ Clarke, Andrew (2021). "Perusall: Social learning platform for reading and annotating". Journal of Political Science Education. 17 (1): 149–154. doi:10.1080/15512169.2019.1649151. S2CID 202328976.
  14. ^ Mazur, Eric. "Transform your teaching with Perusall". Harvard University. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

External links edit

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